The Research On The Influence Mechanism Of Supervisor Undermining On Employees’ Adaptive Performance

Building and maintaining good and harmonious interpersonal relationships in organizations is not only beneficial to the achievement of individual performance goals and the promotion of individual career development and success,but is also vital to the proper functioning of the organization and the achievement of its core objectives.However,in recent years,as competition within organizations increases and the composition of employees becomes more complex,various types of interpersonal conflicts and negative interactions have become more frequent and negative interpersonal relationships with obvious negative intentions have become more common within organizations.Supervisor undermining is one of the typical negative interpersonal interactions that is designed to deliberately discourage employees from building and maintaining good interpersonal relationships in the organization,or even to damage their reputation and hinder their career development(Duffy et al.,2002).It has been shown that there is a significant negative relationship between employees’ perceptions of supervisory blocking and their job well-being(Vinokur et al.,1993),organizational commitment and job satisfaction(Duffy et al.,2002),and that the negative effects of supervisor undermining on employees’ interpersonal relationships,performance and reputation not only reduce employee and organizational performance,but also lead to lower performance and may even lead to counterproductive behavior(Duffy et al.,2002).In addition,in the VUCA environment,adaptive employee performance is becoming an effective means of enhancing organizational core competencies,and employees who fail to proactively adapt to changes in the internal and external environment,and fail to keep pace with organizational development and change,are bound to have an impact on the stability of the organization as a whole.Therefore,from the perspective of negative leadership behavior,this study aims to explore the specific manifestations of supervisor inhibition in the context of Chinese organizational culture and how it affects employee adaptive performance.This article is based on the theory of resource conservation and existing research,and constructs a model that supervisors’ inhibition can have a negative impact on employees’ adaptive performance by increasing their sense of workplace loneliness.In addition,in order to explore the boundary conditions under which supervisor inhibition plays a role in workplace loneliness,this study used employee political skills as a moderating variable and constructed a moderated mediation model.And 277 effective questionnaires were collected through a combination of online and offline methods,and data analysis was conducted using Spss25.0 and Mplus8.7 data statistical analysis software.The results showed that:(1)Supervisor inhibition has a significant negative effect on employee adaptability performance;(2)Workplace loneliness partially mediates the negative impact of supervisor inhibition on employee adaptive performance;(3)The political skills of employees play a moderating role in the positive effect of supervisor inhibition on workplace loneliness.Specifically,the higher the political skills of employees,the weaker the positive effect of supervisor inhibition on workplace loneliness;On the contrary,the lower the political skills of employees,the stronger the positive effect of supervisors’ inhibition on workplace loneliness;(4)Employee political skills can partially mediate the negative relationship between workplace loneliness and supervisor inhibition and employee adaptive performance.Specifically,the higher the political skills of employees,the partial mediating effect of workplace loneliness on the negative relationship between supervisor inhibition and employee adaptive performance will be weakened;On the contrary,it will be strengthened.Finally,this study provides further explanations of the findings and proposes management suggestions at three levels: the firm,the supervisor and the individual employee,as well as distilling the innovations of this paper,which include: firstly,distinguishing the source of deterrence,focusing on supervisor undermining and enriching the study of the antecedent variables of employee adaptive performance;secondly,discovering the mediating role of workplace loneliness based on resource conservation theory and clarifying the mediating mechanism of the role of supervisor undermining on employee.Thirdly,the study clarifies that supervisor undermining are dependent on the level of employees’ political skills,and the boundary conditions of the effect of supervisor undermining on workplace loneliness are clarified.In addition,the shortcomings of this study are summarised and future research perspectives are proposed.